Phonics is the study of sound to spelling correlations. Phonics instruction may include a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system. Phonics, as described herein, involves connections between two main components: phonemes, which may be a spoken sound for a word-part; and graphemes, which may be one or more letters representing the same word-part. Phonemes may be represented by a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, which may be composed of symbols representing phonemes (sounds) for a particular language.
The correlation of phonemes to graphemes to form a lexicon is typically a time consuming manual process based on the knowledge of native speakers and/or readers. The process is prone to errors such as omissions because mappings between graphemes and phonemes can be numerous. This complicates the teaching of language as well as other pursuits.